Smile. Your Cheeks Become Apples.

Bus journeys, conservatories, and APPLES. Oh my.

He has a huge house with a dark-red womb room and sofas and an apple tree dropping this year's glut. It's the girl house. The boy house is next door, attached but separated by the colour - blue for a boy, with a boy face above the front-door. The girl house has a girl face, smiling, welcoming.

But I have astronauts and planets and stars and THE WHOLE OF TIME AND SPACE on my floor. Win.

And beautiful Victoria Park, lush with leaves and lush-as-formed-by-Geordie-lips. Where warehouses seem to breed, populating the area with nonchalant artsy coolness. A bakery called Loafing, where the brownies are piled high, the wooden tables are well-sanded, and many a Guardian shall be read. Walking to Broadway Market, London Fields, Museum of Childhood, strolling strolling all over East London, even marching to Roman Road. Cycling to Columbia Road Market on Sundays and bringing back sunflowers in my basket. So sickening the sweetness eats itself up and becomes stomachable. More than stomachable. Lovely. A taste I am learning to acquire.

I make a promise however. I will eat an apple from the little garden at the back of the big girl house each and every time I visit.

MOOD

I bought myself a mood ring.
So now I know what mood I'm in.

I bought it from my mad relatives' bonkers stone shop in Bridlington.

It's good that it tells me how I'm feeling. It mostly tells me I'm 'very happy'. Dark blue does not mean I'm feeling blue. Apparently.

A rainbow ring that knows things.

All flails have grease on the balls

'Stop! Let us behold the VISTA!'

Coast, coast, and some more coast. And dramatic pauses, in which to APPRECIATE the vistas.

I appreciate all the jet (not jet-packs or jet-engines, not this time...) that could be polished and shaped into two-pence pieces, useful for the arcades. I'm more addicted to the glorious tackiness and so-called 'faded splendour' rather than any gambling thrill. Though we do win a spiky rubber bouncing ball named Steven. With a 'v'.

I appreciate the warning in the church (distorted and squished onto a wooden board as though the preacher hadn't thought through the word spacing, so instilled with righteous venom was s/he): 'Keep thy tongue from evil and thy lips from speaking guile'. Words to be heeded. And listened to through ear-trumpets linked to the pulpit mouthpieces, introduced when one Reverend had a deaf wife.

I appreciate the Anglo Saxon princess named Hild. I bet she was an armoured beauty with balls, who would think glass slippers, crystal tiaras, and long golden locks both impractical and ridiculous. And she would have slept on something far more character-building than my luxurious princess-bed at our coastal cottage. A cottage where I cannot indulge my inner Catherine Morland - we don't find mysterious chests that suggest murder, rather mini-action figures, chewing gum and cigarette lighters. Whitby Abbey is where Catherine can reign free however. Spying sunlight through the windowless arches, where the GOTHIC is shot to a level beyond. To a level of heavenly-hell, where the eye is drawn...

I really appreciate Ancient Warrior of Scarborough, where 'all flails have grease on the balls'. Thank goodness for that.

I appreciate the lovely man that was Alfo Lieth.

So we pause and appreciate the vistas. Not all of us pause in our verbal discourse however, leading to the gripping whodunit creations soon to be on our bookshelves: 'Nicholas Kirk and the Case of the Missing Consonants', and the sequel, 'Nicholas Kirk and the Absence of the Fingerspace Application'. *Spoiler* The plot of the former will involve bloodcurdling murder, Rabbis and rabbits.

I appreciate Cagoules most of all.

[Mr & Mrs TREAT]

Thought Foxed

I MUST REMEMBER TO MEASURE MY HEAD. [For the forthcoming mortar board.]

I think my head may have stretched like elastic, about to snap, but my brain shrinks. Shrivelled by estate agents viewings viewings spelling my name over and over K-I-R-K phone calls ring ring ring constantly coming from my now psychedelic screen, cracked like my nerves. Making me shout about the Simon Amstell concept confusion and flail when cooking cheese sauce.

The phone calls also bring baking bagel smells and a whole community of Orthodox Jews. Stamford Hill, skullcaps, ringlets that swing on many ages of men. Wearing black, but not all doom and gloom when I answer and it leads me here.

The purple jumper has been found. Rain cannot enter bandstands. I drink Cava from plastic cups and laugh with boys and go back to being adolescent when my best friend lit my hair with a cigarette lighter to see what happened and cheap cider drove us to spin like dizzy ducks. I return to eating my Barbican Picnics. All this means that I retain my blood as the estate agent vampires suck suck suck it out of me. They suck like Marina Abramovic does when she discovers her Death self, inhaling another's exhaled air for a full seventeen minutes. Then she passes out. I pass out into her firestars and scrubbed skeletons and stomach-piercing rose thorns as respite from the ringing.

[Marina and her Death self]

Other vampires beckon. Original vampires of books, where books will be read and blood will not be drained, but flow, cheeks flushed by Whitby winds. My stake can be left behind for this better sort of vampire.

Stasis

We bought three bunches of statice on Sunday morning at Columbia Road Market.

Flower-sellers shouting like in My Fair Lady. Throwing their voices hoping that we will throw our money back. A boy being trained up by his parents long in the trade. He is loudest by far. Me with my camera, photographs of petal clashes, views down stalls, two friends outside Wes-Anderson-New-York-style buildings with stoops. Looking out the window of the second floor of a second-hand bookshop, reading blurbs to a backdrop of 'twenty stems for a fiver!'. Discussing and lusting over sweetpeas, a term of endearment I often use, smelling yummy and reminding her of oysters in bonnets. Wandering on to Broadway Market for chai tea lattes and the Observer and being told off for sitting too far out into the street on unstable chair legs.

We buy three bunches of statice, though I want a thousand. A whole sea of statice, blues and purples, with little splashes of yellow like tiny fish fins. At first I hear it as 'stasis'. Stability. Not a word I have been applying to times of late. But this is a suspended moment. Staring into statice.

Split between two vases on our freshly table-clothed kitchen table, it looks as though we picked our flowers out in the field only that morning.

My megabus bag is full of Kafka, histories of God and Irish poetry.

FOR GOODNESS' SAKE

When all I want to do is write like Los Campesinos.
About punctuation - ellipses, parentheses, correct apostrophes - boys, girls, and accelerated readers.

And I want to kiss this: